The changes you made are too timid and only on the surface, and also not complete.
I don’t know how you’re using references for this painting, but it looks like you are doing all the these that I see beginner/intermediate artists do and making the same mistakes. The figure just looks awkward, with the top of her head too small, her hands looking stiff and unnatural, her arms vague stomps instead of having anatomical structure, and her right shoulder/upper arm contradicting the direction/position of the elbow. Read this post I wrote in another thread about the dangers of “Frankensteining” your references: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showpost.php?p=7237400&postcount=21
The consistency/hierarchy of your textures/details don’t make sense. The grass and mountain and cloud really far away actually contains more detail and texture than the tree, which is much closer to us. The tree is also inexplicably vague and smudgy at the top compared to the bottom. There are also arbitrary edges on the figure, such as the blurry contour of the skirt, in the folds, and the ribbon tied around her waist.
The composition is still awkward, without effective placement of your major shapes and values. For example, the cloud shape roughly takes up the same amount of space as the mountain, or the light-bloomed area of the sky on the right. In fact, you can pretty much divide your sky into four equal quadrants of cloud, dark sky, over-blown sky, and normal sky. The tree place at the border of image also doesn’t help. (Did you read up on the classical guidelines of composition? Read up on Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, and Divine Proportions.)
The figure still gives the impression of being squat because you have chosen to hide the length of her legs with the grass. It’s fine to have tall grass, but at least show some clear indication of how long her legs really are, or else you’re creating the illusion of a short and squat person with very short legs.
There’s still too much unexplained brightness on her coming from the viewer’s direction. Unless there’s an artificial photography strobe light coming from her left/front, she should not be this bright–it looks very artificial, like she’s in a photography studio standing in front of a painted background and lit with a photography strobe light from our direction. If you must light her up, choose a logical light source–something that makes sense for this premise. Maybe a bonfire, a torch, a little cottage with a roaring fireplace.
The lighting on the whole scene has similar problems, where you are arbitrarily lighting up areas and directions while trying to “explain” the details, instead of faithfully adhering to the lighting scheme you have designed in the first place.
Sometimes, you really do have to bite the bullet and pull an image apart and redo a significant portion of it, or completely redoing it, making changes structurally from the ground up (from the basic composition and on up), in order to truly improve it. Otherwise, you’re just polishing the surface and not really improving it by much. If you’re serious about improving as an artist, then you have to face the challenging and have the courage to rip apart your work and rebuilt from the ground up to be better. For writers, this is called “kill your darlings,” but it applies to all creative people.
